S. I. Hayakawa Quotes

If you spend your time trying to learn English, you fall behind in your course content… I know because when I came here I could not speak English. So that was the idea of Congress when we passed bi-lingual education. But that was to only go on for a short time—one and one half years. But many of the bi-lingual education programs of today go on for year after year and they are destructive because the primary objective is to learn English.

One of the biggest problems is - you know, I've got some Hispanic friends - is that a lot of those folks that don't know English, is primarily because they don't even know Spanish. They don't even know their own language.

For the benefit of those who are not bilingual, I will now continue in English.

They say that immigrants don’t speak English. So? Who cares. Even the Irish learned English after a while.

The idea of Homo monolinguis - one-languaged man - the idea of children having to grow into one system before we confuse them with another mental system, is an idea with which, unfortunately, many people are brought up now.

It's rare to find an Indian who speaks Chinese. It's rare to find a Chinese who can speak any of the Indian languages. Neither of them at the trading level - I want to repeat this, at the trading level - can speak English, either.

Our common language is English. And our common task is to ensure that our non-English-speaking children learn this common language.

In addition to the research, I enjoyed learning French and assimilating the culture of another country.

After I arrived in Mountain View, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area, I entered sixth grade and quickly grew to love my new home, family and culture. I discovered a passion for language, though it was hard to learn the difference between formal English and American slang.

What is Americanization? It manifests itself, in a superficial way, when the immigrant adopts the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here. Far more important is the manifestation presented when he substitutes for his mother tongue the English language as the common medium of speech.

I'm pretty good with languages. I know a bit of French and actually want to live in France some day so that I can get fluent. I think it'd be tragic to go through life only knowing one language.

Language is a social art.

You only have to look at London, where almost half of all primary school children speak English as a second language, to see the challenges we now face as a country. This isn't fair to anyone: how can people build relationships with their neighbours if they can't even speak the same language?

When you become an American, they give you an injection so your accent changes.

What I'm interested in is how people are reading and writing English.

I want to be open to the kids who only speak Spanish, the kids who speak only Spanglish, and the kids who don't even speak Spanish at all.

I've never lived in an English-speaking country, ever, but I lived in Austria. So, my second language is German. And when I went to school, I had a lot of classes in English.

I didn't speak English until I came to Pittsburgh.

It took me a year to really learn the American lingo. I really feel for people who are coming here and don't speak English at all. It must be hell.

Over 90 percent of parents in Puerto Rico want their children to be totally fluent in English.

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.

I didn't move to Miami to live in a Spanish-speaking province.

Let's see to it that our children, our young people, learn English.

Latin America must follow the education model, that allows children to handle the English language from a very early age.

Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks.